Youth.  So wasted on the young.  Some young people may have great natural intelligence that God, nature, luck, or whatever you chose to call it, provides them with.  But for most of those all that intelligence is not going to help much until some wisdom is added to go with it.  Wisdom comes usually from experience, but if you bother to learn from those who have lived and learned from experience your ride through life can be a lot smoother.  Obvious.  E.g., if you are approaching the road you want to turn onto at a high speed that will not allow a safe turn, perhaps you should not try to make the turn and instead go to the next intersection to circle back rather than slamming into the turn so fast that you end up hitting the car stopped waiting to turn onto the road you were on, or perhaps even better you should have gone with driving at a safe speed to begin with like parents and / or the driving instructor told you.  At least I presume that someone told the distraught but seemingly intelligent young girl who hit us in that situation about safe driving habits.  Let us begin.

A brilliant and wonderful young person, who sometimes challenges my way of thinking, or occasionally frustrates, with thoughts that express interesting mental pathways, brought up an idea a few days ago that made me consider the idea of the sound bite as perhaps a hidden evil.  He said words to the effect that "those who want to go back to the way things were do not remember how bad they were".  This was not the first time I have heard this sound bite, and I finally realized why I had not liked the idea when I heard it before.  There was no time to discuss, but if there had been I would have agreed with the obvious part of this but noted that such sound bites carry with them unstated falsehoods.  Examine by example:  Yes, it is better to have regulations and laws preventing lead in paint used on houses and gasoline, due to health impacts.  Or advances that allow us to drive safer cars.  Or to not let anyone starve/be homeless/be without medical care even if they are not able to or do not choose to work.  However, not all regulations and laws are good, and there needs to be control over those who make them, since they are neither smart enough nor wise enough to speak for us all, to not overstep their bounds.  To not allow their sometimes overindulgent concepts of economic / social justice is important, if we are not to go into a permanent economic crisis and loss of fundamental freedoms.  It is critical to have limits in how far those rules go, and in what can be a rule.  For example, there is ample evidence that breathing mercury fumes is bad for people.  So why do we allow rules that practically dictate the use of mercury containing light bulbs to combat global warming which may or may not be a serious problem?  And why do we allow rules for improving gas mileage that drive the cost of cars up instead of letting the industry do this through competition, which might take longer but has the advantage of allowing those who chose to drive the over sized gas hogs the right to drive a safer vehicle at the cost of paying for more gas?  Should those on welfare who chose not to work be paid more for having kids, or allowed to vote for greater and greater benefits for themselves thus increasing the enslavement of the working class?

We can see that some rules are good, some are bad.  Unfortunately the bad ones are not dealt with by being deleted, and even the good ones do not have changes made to remove or modify the bad aspects that they have (the Americans with Disabilities Act, allowing scum lawyers a field day suing small business, for example).  To combat the wrong, what we need to do is go back to the way things were for our foundations.  Yes, here is where the sound bite bites the dust.  We need to use the foundations of this great country to prevent regulations and laws that should not be allowed from hurting the American people worse than they have been already.  We need to use the Constitutional guarantees and definition of the proper functions of government to limit what that government can do to us.  What about those rules I used as examples before?  I started with accepting restrictions on the use of lead.  Pure competition allows the use of lead since it was probably cheaper, thus conferring a competitive advantage.  But the cost to the citizens was high, in terms of medical problems, a cost that the paint and gasoline makers shifted to the people instead of bearing themselves.  So it was right to have the federal government step in to reduce the harm based on the interstate nature of the problem.  The rules for safer cars impact not only those who drive the cars who were often not informed of the problem a car had with safety before being purchased (and so were uninformed and unprotected from the car makers), but also those nearby who benefit by not being involved if an unsafe car goes out of control.  And providing some support for the needs for those who chose not to work, while not a guarantee in the Constitution, is the right thing to do, as long as the amount provided does not become excessive.

The regulation of light bulbs and gas mileage, however, present no such case of third party loss.  Given that there is no proven impact that either energy use for lighting or gas consumption in cars presents an overriding impact on the world or third parties (sorry, but the whole global warming issue, especially mankind's role in it if it is happening, remains a theory without solid foundation.  I suggest looking up the problems that lack of critical knowledge about some aspects of how weather works that had to be guessed at in the models used to show future warming have as a start) there is no valid excuse to force high prices and loss of choice through government rules mandating certain light bulbs and high gas mileage.  The thorny issue about support for the poor has me thinking.  Perhaps in addition to not paying for children, there should be a limit to how long a person who does not have physical disabilities should be able to receive welfare?  This would solve two problems.  First, the cost of government for entitlement programs would drop, second, the illegal problem would take a hit since the unskilled citizens would be taking those jobs.  Genius, and wise.  Who would have guessed?

Another aspect of how things have changed for the worse is the "de-niceification" of our society.  Manners mostly gone, both on and off the road.  The loss of honesty and respect when dealing with people.  The attitude of taking being better than working together.  All these traits helped make the US, and the West in general strong, and their loss in today's world makes us all weak.  Perhaps I will consider why this self imposed collapse of our society is occurring in a future post, but for now, I wish you all well.